Category Archives: Year in Review

It’s time to start asking the question. It’s time to be cynical. It’s time to assume the worst of this government. Has Supreme Court Justice John Roberts been blackmailed or intimidated? I would put nothing by the Obama administration that lives and rules by the Chicago thug playbook.

Is the idea implausible that this same Obama administration that orders IRS attacks, then orders destruction of key evidence, would stop at nothing to save Obama’s signature achievement? Is it impossible to believe that Obama and his socialist cabal that learned from Saul Alinsky that “the ends justify the means” would hold something over a Supreme Court justice’s head? It’s time to ask the question loudly and boldly because something is clearly wrong in Washington, D.C.

Is that the purpose of government agencies like the IRS and the NSA that are abusing our rights – to listen to us, to watch us, to find something we’ve done wrong, and then use it to intimidate, harass, threaten or extort key political figures so that Obama can “fundamentally change America?”

That has been the consistent message of the Malloy administration, starting at least as far back as February. Some spin doctor told Malloy and his troops: keep saying the “brighter” thing.

At times, it has caused public officials to sound like they were doing a treacly light bulb commercial instead of the people’s business. Here is Malloy spokesman Devon Puglia explaning to WNPR (thanks, Diane) why it’s a good thing to gut the library budget. Because brighter!

And in describing the weekend budget deal, Malloy decided to bring on da poetry. You know, some fresh new imagery!

Another thing we can always do on The Nose is talk about very, very shallow topics. Because, as Einstein said, “Sometimes you get so shallow, it starts to get deep.” Einstein was totally baked when he said this.

But yes! If you told me that Kim Kardashian’s book of her life told in selfies was lying there under the porte cochere, I would run out and get it and look at it even though my grasp of who she is is so vague as to be almost unpatriotic. Still a narcissistic machine understanding its own narcissism. The Singularity!

We can move on now, although it has to be said that if there’s an award for 2015 Hamburglar journalism, the field will be as thick as special sauce.

What if we don’t want to eat Mickey D’s? What if we want Whole Foods but we are still pretending to be poor with our friend Gwyneth?

This!!!! WF CEO John Mackey interviewed via Skype from his sex-cabana on Mars: “You have to evolve with the marketplace. We may have hit some limit of how much crazy money you can take away from stupid rich people.”* (*Made-up quote.) The Nose may discuss the name of this excellent new place, although panelist Taneisha Duggan sprinted ahead of us with SNAPeas.

We know! We know! Over here at the New York Liberty, a WNBA basketball team, we were putting the finishing touches on our deal to have Isaiah Thomas take over as president, and a guy from the cleaning crew was passing through emptying wastebaskets and he said, “None of my business, but you might have some problems with your women’s fans because of his whole sexual harassment case.” And we said: What? Is some janitor telling us that Isaiah is not a huge win all around? What? Maybe in Peru where he comes from this is a bigger deal. But we thanked him. And then guess what: it almost seems like he was right!

Sports sports sports! My favorite NFL tradition is when the ref comes in right before the game and measures your balls. Or is that “Dancing With the Stars?” We’re not sure whether, on the Nose, we have anything new, anything meta, anything media-studies-y to say about Deflate-gate. But it’s more probable than not that we do! If nothing else, it should be the catch phrase of this weekend. But even if your spouse screams, “It’s more probable than not that you promised to take me to Chili’s, you @&%$!,” it is still not OK to pick her up and throw her. OK?

Unless you are Floyd Mayweather. It’s kind of amazing that, at the end of the Greatest Fight of the Century If It Had Been Held Five Years Earlier, there is a huge stinking scandal that does not involve Floyd. Instead, it involves Pacman, who decided he could beat Mayweather with one hand tied behind his back but did not tell anybody about this plan except possibly God. And now, he faces lawsuits from decent people who paid good money to see men hit each other much harder in the face.

Enjoy this post while I make a list of our non-sports possible topics.

WTIC has laid off its news director Dana Whalen, who has labored hard enough and long enough and with consistent enough reliability and professionalism that she deserves to be in some Hall of Fame. This one?That one? I can’t find a bio of her. That’s typical. Dana has been the model of a working journalist, all grit, no flash. She’s the lunchpail broadcast journalist in a profession dotted with divas. I have no idea how many years she has given WTIC-AM. More than 20. She may have done an earlier stint. But no number will measure that because Whalen, in a way that alarmed the rest of us, worked 7 days a week more often than not, and rarely as few as 8 hours a day. She carried the newsroom. If they thinned out the staff, she took the extra hours on her shoulders. This, apparently, is her reward.

In her rare moments of leisure, Dana is a theater nut, with an encyclopedic knowledge of musicals, perhaps especially Sondheim.

I’ve heard from many of my former colleagues, all of them shaking their heads over this one.

Also laid off, Joanne, the wonderful receptionist for the four CBS stations in Farmington. She’s the mold they use to make other receptionists.

One of the themes of 2015, for me, is people getting in huge amounts of trouble for doing things that don’t seem all that bad. In other words, the whole Jon Ronson thing. None of us is exempt. I’ve already had one guy, listening to me on the WWL Wheelhouse, accuse me of being a racist based on a certain inflection, a wryness he detected in my voice when I spoke of Sir Charles. At least he had the decency to accuse me privately. There are exceptions. Britt McHenry really needed to be brought up short and I totally believe she is going to be a sweet and wonderful person from now on. I mean, go ahead. Tow her car again. I bet she’ll be cool with it.

THING SHE DID: I’d give it a 1. I mean, pasting in the (anal beads) porn link by mistake is way over on the “funny little thing that happened” side of the scale, as opposed to the “this proves you’re a horrible person” side. That’s why McElroy’s a 1 and McHenry’s a 7. I know! They’re hard to keep straight

AMOUNT OF PUBLIC SHAMING: 4? It seems that, professionally, there were some fairly ridiculous consequences. And according to all the updates in that link, I guess it went a wee bit viral. But you can still count me among the people who didn’t really remember this story and thought McElroy was kind of dumb to revive it (and probably double its audience in the process).

SEVENTIES MEMORY THIS STIRS UP. Part of Chevy Chase’s shtik when he anchored SNL’s Weekend Update was to be caught on the phone saying something compromising — “I’m sure the trucker just thought you had your head in my lap.” — as the camera went live. And I swear to you, one of those was: “I still don’t understand who pulls out the beads.”

With no money for staff and upkeep of our once-proud state park system, why not knock things down and market the faux ruins?

A second concept, called an “ecological park,” would involve restoration of a historic building as a visitor center, while other buildings may be demolished or restored to a ruined state to preserve the spirit of the history of the property.

The great thing about this is idea is that when the park falls into neglect, nobody will be able to tell!

An “attractive ruin” is a building left intentionally in a ruined state intended to be evocative of the structure’s historical uses.